This year's comedy festival looked like an open field as the fringe began, and it stayed that way. There were few superstars, but lots of fine shows. Comedy found itself challenged in the first week to respond to the riots sweeping England. (That's why it's a great artform: people expect it to be urgent, reactive and communicative.) Plenty 0f standups answered the call; two of the fringe's most political comedy sets – Andrew Maxwell's and Josie Long's – were nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy award. But silliness reigned. The buzz shows were Nick Helm and Adam Riches's raucous participative floorshows, suggesting an appetite among 2011 audiences for event-comedy that bashes them around the head and forces them to muck in.

The silent comedy award

A decent year for nu-vaudeville was marked by a Comedy award nomination for unknown New York duo Chris and Paul, who found themselves compared to Stan and Ollie as critics belatedly circled their off-the-beaten-track show. Other hit silent(ish) comedies included award-winning Aussie show The Hermitude of Angus, Ecstatic, and, best of all, a blissful set from that flirtatious clown Doctor Brown. His set, combining subtle and skilled physical comedy with smouldering sexiness and a will to chaos, was one of the funniest in town.

Thank you, awareness-raisers

At a festival that has taken Neil and Christine Hamilton to its heart, it's always a pleasure to unearth radical points of view. Among a good crop of engaged comic acts this year, Australia's Aamer Rahman and Nazeem Hussain addressed racism in their show Fear of a Brown Planet; Josie Long stirred up anti-Tory dissent with her Comedy award-nominated set; and Andrew Maxwell described self-regulation in the banking industry as "a hand-job on a yacht". I also enjoyed Jesse Briton's performance in My Fortnum and Mason Hell, a faux-naive narrative about a bassoonist arrested for protesting against Tory cuts. And, in a terrific show mainly about his love life, Russell Kane's routines about The X Factor and first-class train travel contained some of the finest and funniest critical thinking about British public life.

Best use of inner demons

The comedy of psychic pain was well represented. Standup Terry Alderton argued aloud with his demonic subconscious; Nick Helm's rasping fury barely concealed a need to be loved; Cariad Lloyd had great fun seeking a father figure in the front row. We loved Sam Simmons, whose cavalcade of random nonsense, Meanwhile, amounts to a frenetic defence against distress. But none could rival the Daykin sisters' double-act Toby, which turned dysfunctional sibling rivalry and suicidally low self-esteem into a wickedly playful docu-comedy show.

Gimmick of the year

The fringiest fringe experience of 2011 was visiting Simon Munnery's pop-up restaurant La Concepta, which appeared in a different outdoor location daily, for an exclusive guestlist of four. The only catch, food lovers: none of the dishes actually exist. Its closest rival was the propriety-smashing show ComedySale.com. The trick here is that comic Sanderson Jones Googles his audience individually before the show, and confronts us on stage with the alarming traces of ourselves strewn all around cyberspace. It's a brilliant idea, to be watched through one's fingers, and laughed at through one's shame.

Best loveless Surrey housewife

Who can resist comedy when, having made us laugh, it then makes us cry? The best examples this year included Luke Wright's Cynical Ballads about modern Britain, and former Comedy award champ Tim Key's bath-tub rhapsody Masterslut. First among equals was Isy Suttie's musical tale Pearl and Dave, about her reclusive neighbour's Skype affair with a loveless Surrey housewife. "She never saw the tears in his eyes because of the candlelight." Suttie thrums the heartstrings like a flamenco guitarist.

This year's was a good fringe, full of innovation, self-confidence and a real sense of playfulness. The influence of the Forest Fringe – the festival's free, even more eccentric wing – could be discerned in the rise of edgy new venues such as Summerhall, the space curated by Battersea Arts Centre. St George's West had a renaissance, taking risks in its programming that were rewarded with sell-out audiences. Problems remain, however. New writing, even at Scotland's nervecentre for new writing, the Traverse, isn't as healthy as it might be, and next year will present major challenges: the Olympics are taking place simultaneously, syphoning away resources from the festival – resources that will be even more scarce if we experience a double-dip recession. Yet if the fringe continues to reinvent itself, as it did this year, it will survive.

Most annoying use of gadgetry

This was the year the fringe got technological, and it's still very much a learning process. The low-point was standing lost in Edinburgh staring at a mobile phone in Blast Theory's A Machine to See With. Shows using wireless headphones were big. Red Shift's Invisible Show II and Every Minute, Always prodded the possibilities; And the Birds Fell from the Sky was wild if mystifying. Fish and Game's iPad show Alma Mater didn't quite hold the story together either, but was ahead of the game in harnessing technology to unsettling effect.

Well done for just getting here

British theatre faces a tough financial future, but a rising generation of graduate companies flocked to Edinburgh this year. That they got here at all suggests a steely determination and an entrepreneurial spirit; what's more, many of these youngsters have considerable skills – Robert Lepages in the making. Curious Directive's superbly confident multi-layered Your Last Breath was a case in point. A shout-out, too, for Junction 25's stunning I Hope My Heart Goes First in which you felt the teenagers genuinely felt every word and gesture.

The plucky buggers award

Blind Summit's triptych beat off competition from the insanely lovable The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik and the dotty 3D animation show Swamp Juice. The Girl With the Iron Claws was a masterclass in storytelling through puppetry, while Bootworks' five-minute The Incredible Book Eating Boy was a miniature marvel. Young companies have woken up to the fact that puppetry isn't just a way of putting an extra actor on stage without paying food and accommodation costs, but a brilliant theatrical tool.

Bully me, cajole me, love me

This year, the audience were the stars. In show after show, we were bullied, cajoled, celebrated. Ontroerend Goed's clever, infuriating Audience garnered most of the attention, but there were plenty of other shows in which the viewers were put to the test. Tim Crouch's I, Malvolio demanded to know why we were laughing. You Once Said Yes sent us across the city. Best of all was Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe in The Oh Fuck Moment, a show that initially didn't even seem to qualify as theatre but gradually emerged as a moving meditation on how we are the sum of our mistakes.

The very weighty topics award

Hard-hitting, essential and furious, Belarus Free Theatre kept political theatre alive and kicking with Minsk 2011, a show that explored the psyche of living in Europe's last dictatorship. White Rabbit Red Rabbit from Iran considered why we run with the crowd. The Team's Mission Drift dissected the human cost of capitalist growth with an admirably light touch. Gary McNair's Crunch at Forest Fringe made us question our relationship with money – and then shred it.